Revitalizing housing south of 11th presents challenges

By Ken StephensThe Hutchinson Newskstephens@hutchnews.com

Friday

Mar 28, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2014 at 7:00 PM

Over the past few years, the city of Hutchinson has added some new tools to its tool kit, but aside from tearing down more houses that are beyond repair, not much has happened in the “revitalization zone” south of 11th Avenue.

This past week, the Housing Commission invited John Scott, president and CEO of Interfaith Housing Services, a nonprofit that has more than 20 years of experience helping people improve their housing situation, to come in and tell them what else they could be doing.

Instead, Scott came with questions of his own: What are the city’s goals for the revitalization area? What measures will it use to define success?

“It is not Interfaith Housing’s job to resolve the housing problems of Hutchinson,” Scott told the commission. “But we do have a responsibility to collaborate with others on initiatives that better our community as a whole.”

In other words, tell us what you want to accomplish and let’s put our heads together to come up with a coordinated plan.

The hurdles to revitalizing the area south of 11th Avenue are complex.

One is the heritage of decades of solution salt mining, most of which occurred in the city’s southern reaches about a century ago.

Over the years, there have been several instances of sink holes opening up under old brine wells. In once case, a huge crater opened under a set of railroad tracks. More than 30 homeowners in Careyville were bought out and their homes demolished and the land left in a fenced, park-like state because of the possibility of subsidence from a nearby brine well field.

No one knows where all the brine wells were drilled. The major companies and their successors have records of their wells. But many other small companies simply went out of business. Private wells were never recorded, either.

The possibility of subsidence, caused by the collapse of the caverns created in the salt formation by the solution mining, makes development in those areas risky.

In an interview earlier last week, Scott recalled that some years ago the city was prepared to give what was an entire vacant city block in the southern part of the city to Interfaith Housing. Scott learned that Cargill Salt once had a well in one corner of the property. It was marked and capped, and Scott was satisfied that the known data on the well showed little risk of subsidence. Then another man whose family had owned another portion of the block told him they had once had a brine well there as well. But it was unmarked. They couldn’t locate it again. And the great unknown of the condition of the cavern beneath it, wherever it was, prompted Interfaith Housing to turn down the donation.

At an earlier meeting of the Housing Commission, Housing Program Manager Irene Hart passed out a map showing the locations of known brine wells in the city. But those were only the known wells, and their positions were approximate. The map was by no means definitive.

She hopes to explore the possibility of getting a grant to finance a seismic study to locate wells and determine subsurface conditions.

The city’s poorest neighborhoods and oldest, least valuable housing are located south of 11th as well.

Although there are many vacant lots in the area, it can be extremely difficult to get financing for new construction. Because of the low value of houses in the surrounding neighborhood, a new house won’t appraise at a high enough value for a bank to issue a loan for construction costs, Scott said.

Scott agreed that if there was a cluster of new construction, those new houses would appraise higher. But what happens to the poor people already living in the neighborhood? he asked. Would it be right to drive them out because they couldn’t afford higher property taxes as the new construction increased the appraisals of the older homes they may have lived in all their lives?

Scott told the Housing Commission that he doesn’t have the answers, but he’d love to sit down for a brainstorming session with all those involved.

“What are the economic factors that are causing deterioration?” Scott asked. “People live there for a reason. Is it deteriorating because the tenant doesn’t care? Is it because the property is being milked by an absentee landlord?”

“You can renovate every house, but if the people there don’t care, it won’t last anyway. If you’re going to invest a few million dollars in a neighborhood, how do you sustain it?”

Scott’s being realistic, not being callous. He and his organization have probably done more for the area south of 11th Avenue than any other organization or program.

Since 2006, Interfaith Housing has helped 358 homeowners with repairs. Interfaith manages 141 units of rental property. It has helped 113 clients of its CASH program save money toward a first-time home purchase, home repairs or other goals since 2008.

Scott showed the Housing Commission a map with more than 600 stickpins showing where those clients lived, and the overwhelming majority were in the revitalization target area south of 11th Avenue.

But when it comes to repairs of homes occupied by low- to moderate-income owners, Scott said Interfaith is repairing fewer homes per year than it once did and limiting those repairs to critical issues, such as a bad roof or a furnace that doesn’t work, because funding has been harder to come by.

“We do what we can afford with our volunteer (labor) base,” Scott said. “We can’t do everything a house needs.”

Between 1997 and 2005, Interfaith was able to repair about 30 to 35 homes a year, and it was not unusual to put $9,000 to $10,000 into those repairs, Scott said. Because of cuts in state and federal funding, Interfaith did only about 12 homes last year.

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